Â± From: HÃ¥kon Wium Lie [mailto:howcome@opera.com]
Â± Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2011 6:17 AM
Â±
Â± It seems that the current regions model create a fixed set of regions.
I have started a wiki page to collect ideas on generating pages with regions (and possibly templates) [1].
It is initially a cleaned up version of my email from right after TPAC [2].
It should include really simple ways to create page view too - like overflow:paged
Â± Are there other alternatives? I believe that the multicol module [3] offers an
Â± alternative. Columns are generated as needed, and content flows from one to the
Â± next -- just like for regions. If we added a way toBin select and style individual
Â± columns, we could size and position them. They could escape the rigid framework
Â± that multicol currently provides, and fly like angels. Angelic columns.
Â±
Â± For example, to turn the first columnn of an article into something special, we
Â± could write:
Â±
Â± article { columns: 14em; }
Â± article::column(1) {
Â± position: absolute;
Â± font-size: 1.2em;
Â± visibility: collapse; /* makes space available others to use */
Â± ...
Â± }
Â±
Â± For now, this is just a strawman proposal. But it shows that it's possible to have
Â± stylable regions that naturally combine auto-generation.
I would like to suggest taking a step back and look separately at the capability of fragmenting content (which in any sensible implementation should be shared between column, pages and regions), and then try to find the best language constructs to generate and format the fragment.
It is interesting to be able to extend columns like you suggest. It may be confusing too... my initial feeling is that using a new term for columns that move around will be easier to understand, yet for implementation it probably won't make much difference.
Alex
[1] http://wiki.csswg.org/spec/css3-region-templates
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Nov/0123.html